Tuesday, May 31, 2016

In
1967 and 1968 Barth aligned himself with the postmodernist focus on
self-reflexive fiction with two decisive steps.
First he published a controversial essay in the Atlantic entitled
"The Literature of Exhaustion," which, although it has been
misunderstood to have claimed that contemporary fiction writers have "run
out" of a subject for their work, actually urged more of the kind of
self-conscious narrative experimentation being practiced by the South American
writer Jorge Luis Borges.

Secondly,
he published Lost in the Funhouse, an experimental collection of short
stories in which fiction refused to focus its attention on its so-called proper
subject--the external world--and instead continually turned the reader's
attention back to what Barth considered fiction's real subject--the process of
fiction-making itself. All of Barth's
fictional works published since Lost in the Funhouse were similarly
focused on their own narrative structure and methods.

"Autobiography"
is one of the most thoroughgoing self-reflexive fictions in Lost in the
Funhouse, for it does not pretend, as conventional fictions do, that the
voice that speaks the fiction is the voice of a human being; rather it
confronts directly the inescapable fact that what speaks to us is the story itself;
thus, the only autobiography a story can present is a story of its own coming
into being and its own mode of existence.
Once we accept this fact, the rest of this story follows logically.

Every
statement in the story is a assertion, in one way or another, about this
particular fiction's fictionality, whose mother was a mere fictional device of
self-reflexivity which the father/author was attracted to one day. Some of the key characteristics of fiction
in general that the story foregrounds are:
fictions have no life unless they are read; fictions cannot know
themselves; fictions have no body; fictions have one-track minds; fictions can
neither start themselves nor stop themselves; fictions reflect their authors in
distorted ways.

Barth
insists that the prosaic in fiction is only there to be transformed into
fabulation. For Barth, the artist's
ostensible subject is not the main point; rather it is only an excuse or raw
material for focussing on the nature of the fiction-making process.

Great
literature, says Barth, is almost always, regardless of what it seems to be
about, about itself. Perhaps more than
any other American writer in the last quarter of the twentieth century, John
Barth made fiction intensely conscious of itself, aware of its traditions, and
of the conventions that make it possible.
If, as the main currents of modern thought suggest, reality itself is
the result of fiction-making processes, then John Barth is truly a writer
concerned with the essential nature of what is real.

Thanks for Reading: Hope you had a good Short Story Month this
year and had the chance to read lots of short stories.

Tenth Anniversary of My Blog

Friday, Nov. 16, is the tenth anniversary of my blog. I have been taking some time off because I have been working on a new book on the short story. I have submitted a proposal to a publisher and am waiting for a reply. I will let you know when I hear from them. Thank you for continuing to read essays in my archives.

Now Available from Amazon in paperback and Kindle

Click cover to go to Amazon and read the Introduction and first chapter.

Dubliners Centenial

One hundred years ago, the great collection of stories Dubliners by James Joyce appeared. If you are interested in my comments on that collection, see my posts in April 2012 when the book was featured in Dublin's "One City, One Book."